Wireless mesh networks provide a way of creating low cost, flexible networks which may be deployed for many different applications, such as in disaster zones to rapidly provide communication infrastructure or in offices to enable the wireless office. However, aspects of the wireless medium, such as its broadcast nature, inherent variability and interference problems make designing efficient, high throughput networks challenging.
Wireless mesh networks offer the ability to use multiple paths to increase the capacity of the transmission of information link between two nodes, however, since any packet transmitted by a node may be received by more than one node (because of the broadcast nature of the medium), coordination between nodes is required to avoid duplicate transmissions. This coordination generally involves complex signaling and extra communication overhead as nodes communicate with each other to decide which nodes will forward which packets. This reduces the benefit of using multiple paths and complicates any implementation.